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7 Ways To Get Your Website Noticed

Putting your website on the internet is only the first step to get your website noticed.

Sooner or later, the web spiders will crawl around it and a while after that you’ll start appearing in the search results, but probably only for very specific searches such as your company name. And, let’s face it, if someone knows your company name they probably already know a bit about you.

So, how do you go about getting your website noticed by people who don’t already know you?

1. Be the expert

You almost certainly know a lot more about your industry than the average person. So spread the news! Put up a question and answer session on your website. Maybe answer questions in places like Yahoo Answers. Contribute to forums. Wherever you can share your knowledge and start getting your name and website known.

2. Contribute to the web

There’s no rule on the internet that says you have to stay within the boundaries of your own website. Look for sites where you could be a guest author. Or submit some articles to the various article directories – these allow you to have a “resource box” at the end where you can promote your website.

3. Give out your business card

They’ve got your website on them, right? Business cards are an easy ice breaker. But make sure you have a photo on your card – full colour cards are cheap nowadays – so that people can put a face to your name. And use both sides of the card – think of it as a mini sales leaflet, listing the benefits of using you.

4. Run a competition

It doesn’t have to have a massive prize. If the answer to the question can only be found on your website, that could be a good way of introducing people to you. Or the entry form could be an email autoresponder so you can store people’s details and keep in touch with them. Be creative and publicise your competition far and wide.

5. Search Engine Optimisation

Start with the basics: make sure your title and header tags are correct. Then move up to other forms of search engine optimisation such as getting more links pointing to your website. This isn’t an overnight option – optimising your website is a long-haul task that should be taking place as long as you’re doing business on the web. Enlist the help of an expert search engine optimiser if the thought is too daunting.

6. Write a newsletter

It doesn’t have to be a long newsletter. In fact, since most people are pressed for time nowadays, short and sweet will probably get a better response. Talk about things that your readers (potential customers) will find interesting. Don’t be too professional either – let your voice come through in your writing. It’s more personal that way and people will relate to it much better than a corporate email.

7. Write a list

Lists like this one are crowd pullers. Pick up any tabloid newspaper and you’ll see them using lists all the time. “7 Things You Never Knew About …”, “The 5 Mistakes Most People Make When …”, that kind of thing. Keep each headline short and then write a brief explanation below it. Then move on to the next point. It’s quick and easy for you to write and it’s fun and imformative to read.

Click here for help to get your website noticed.

Keeping In Touch With Your Customers

It’s all well and good getting people to find your website but what happens next?

Ideally, assuming you’re in business, you’d like them to buy something from you. But that doesn’t often happen with a first time visitor. It’s a bit like window shopping – unless they have a pressing need that must be met now, chances are your potential customer will want to mull things over first.

So, unless you’re solving an immediate problem such as a burst pipe, failed electrics, toothache or whatever, you need to find some kind of way of keeping in touch with potential customers and wooing them.

Before the internet came along, the main way you had of keeping in touch with your customers was through the post. A newsletter or something similar, delivered by post on a regular or irregular basis. Some companies still do this because it still works as a method. But the internet makes it a lot cheaper to contact current or potential customers on a “personal basis”.

If you only have a handful of customers, you could do this with your email program, sending each email indidivually. But once you get even a few dozen customers, this gets impractical.

Fortunately, there are services out there that allow you to send personalised emails to your customers for a monthly fee.

Don’t be tempted to install a program on your own web host. Sending emails on a regular basis isn’t that simple and it’s just not worth the time and effort making sure they all get delivered to your customer’s inbox rather than their spam folder. And it’s definitely not worth the time and effort dealing with spam complaints which, in some cases, could even get your website hosting shut down. Web hosts are on such slim profit margins that they usually take the view that you’re guilty of spamming until you can prove your innocence. Not good if you want your website up and running to get custom.

The same goes for free email services. Because they’re free, they will attract spammers like moths to a light, regardless of anything they might try to tell you to the contrary.

Treat customer contact as a business expense the same way as you rent your telephone, pay the post office to deliver your mail, etc.

Fortunately, customer contact is a service that can pay for itself. Done correctly, it will pay its way over and over again.

These services are called autoresponders.

They allow you to send out messages to your customers, either on a predetermined schedule or on demand.

Most of them will allow you to set up more than one message sequence. This makes them ideal for customer support after they’ve bought something from you. Chances are you know the after sales questions your customers come up with. These can be written once and sent out on a schedule starting as soon as your customer has bought a particular product.

The messages can be made personal, so you can include the customer’s name and other details. Unless you knew otherwise, they look as though you’ve sent the message personally.

The other main use of autoresponders is to send out a “broadcast” message. This works by sending out a new email to your customers either immediately or scheduled for a specific time and date. So if you’re going to have a sale starting next week, you can set a broadcast message to go out a day or two ahead to let your customers know.

If you run a business that peaks and troughs in demand – maybe a restaurant or maybe just regular seasonality – then this kind of service can be a great way to bring in more customers at an otherwise slack time. Maybe by offering a discount, something free or a bonus of some sort when customers spend more than a certain amount.

You can also use it to encourage your customers to recommend a friend – you’ve almost certainly had offers of a voucher when you introduce a friend to a service you’re using but they aren’t. Pick these offers apart and re-work them for your business.

Used correctly, an email autoresponder service is worth its weight in gold for keeping in touch with your customers. You’re in control of the contacts and can make them as often as you like. That said, make sure you don’t hassle them too often – there can be too much of a good thing.

To my mind, there’s only one company worth using to keep in touch with your customers: Aweber. They’re based in America but deliver emails worldwide and work with all the different email services to ensure your mail gets delivered. They also take care of the spam side of things, unsubscribes (when people change direction and no longer want to receive your messages) and all sorts of other behind the scenes details like the sign up form you use – see the one on this site for an example.

And if you need help with your email campaigns, we’d be happy to help with that. Just contact us and we’ll help you with your email campaign.

5 Ways To Get More Links To Your Website

Get More Links To Your WebsiteGoogle’s search engine algorithm puts a lot of weight on how many people link to your website. It’s a bit like having lots of friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter.

In crude terms, the more people linking to your website the more “popular” and authoritative your site must be.

Of course, there’s a catch. Much like the creatures in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, all links are created equal but some are more equal than others. All other things being equal (a great cop-out phrase!), a link from a site such as the BBC will carry more weight than a link from your picture album about your grandchildren.

Here are 5 ways to get more links to your website (ethically, of course):

Videos

YouTube is one of the most used sites on the internet. Creating a video and putting it on YouTube allows you to also put a link to your website in the description. So the next time Google indexes YouTube – which happens on a very regular basis – it is likely to find your link and count that as a positive vote for your site’s popularity.

If your video is popular, you’re also likely to get some people clicking across to your website and there’s also a chance that it will appear in the main Google search results.

Articles

These have been around thousands of years – as long as there has been the written word – so it’s no surprise that the internet has a large quantity of published articles. With the advent of easy publishing methods such as the internet, anyone can become a published author.

You’ve probably come across articles from sites such as EzineArticles when you’ve been searching the web. This features thousands of authors and, with a little time and effort, you can join their ranks. Getting your article published on this kind of site allows you to have a brief advert (technically called a resource box) for yourself or your website at the end. Which means another link to your website.

Article sites have the added benefit that the articles are available for syndication across the web. The only stipulation is that your resource box stays with the article and that your links are clickable as well. It’s a great way of building up your inbound links.

Article writing is the backbone of many campaigns to increase inbound links for one very good reason: it works.

Profile Links

Chances are that you have a profile on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Most of these profiles have a space for you to add your own website link. Take a few minutes to go through the various sites you’re a member of and update your profile so that it includes a link to your website.

Press Releases

A few years ago, press releases really were released to journalists in the hope of getting your story in the news. Whilst this still happens to an extent. A lot press releases nowadays are written as barely disguised advertisements – you can spot one of more of them most days in your newspaper. Maybe they’re a survey, maybe they’re how many brussels sprouts Waitrose sold in the run up to Christmas but essentially a lot of them are a space filler for time pressed journalists.

The good news is that the internet allows you to produce and post your own press releases.

The even better news is that these don’t have to ever get printed in a newspaper or magazine or even make it to Google News (although there’s a good chance that last option could happen). They count as another inbound link from a trusted site. Producing regular press releases is a habit worth getting into.

Blog comments

This technique is often misused. Most of the posts on this site have comments disabled, mainly because even with the anti-spam options there are still way too many people posting spammy comments – looking at the recent stats on one of my blogs, 20,649 spam comments have been eliminated to date, most of them by the comment spam protection systems I use.

So you should use blog comments sparingly and only when you have something worthwhile to add to the post. Done correctly, with meaningful comments related to the post concerned, blog comments are a good way to get backlinks to your website.

If all this sounds too much like hard work, check out our website optimisation packages and we’ll do the hard work for you, allowing you to concentrate on what you do best – running your own business.

We can help you get more links to your website!

Browser Compatibility: What Does Your Website Look Like On Different Computers?

From March 2010, Microsoft has agreed to the European Union’s request to open up Windows users to the option of different browsers.

Which you may have dismissed as the usual legal stuff that doesn’t affect people in real life.

But in this instance, there are implications for your website.

Until this date, Windows users in Europe defaulted to using Internet Explorer. To use a different browser such as Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera or whatever they had to actively seek it out.

Now, over a period of a few months, when the appropriate Windows Update takes place, people will be offered a “browser ballot” and asked to choose their default browser from a random selection.

The upshot of this is that you need to make sure that your website doesn’t “break” in one of these alternative browsers because an increasing share of your site visitors will be using something other than Internet Explorer.

Checking what your website looks like in different browsers and even on different operating systems is increasingly important. If you maintain your own website, this is down to you. If you employ someone, you need to make sure that they are checking what your site looks like.

It’s fairly easy to install the latest version of browsers such as Firefox and Google Chrome on your computer. But that still doesn’t tell you what Mac users or people using older operating systems, computers or browsers are experiencing.

There are a variety of online services that will process your website – Browsershots will do this for about 80 different combinations of browser and operating systems and you can fine tune your results according to screen resolution and all sorts of other options. That’s probably overkill but it definitely pays to check your website in each of the major browsers whenever you make a change to the display.

Robots.txt: What Is It? Why Do You Need It?

What is robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a small file that sits on your website.

Well behaved robots – such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc – will check the file each time they crawl around your website to make sure that they only index the parts of your site that you want them to view.

Badly behaved robots will ignore it completely but that’s a different story.

Since robots.txt is designed to be used by computers, it has a standard layout that needs to be followed.

You can make your own robots.txt file with Notepad or any other text editor.

At its simplest, you can just allow all robots to crawl anything and everything on your website. To do this, you’d create a robots.txt file with the following two lines:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

The  first line tells the robots (also known as user-agents) that all of them are allowed in – that’s indicated by the * symbol which is computer-geek for “everyone”.

The second line is shorthand for the whole of your site.

If you didn’t want any robots to index any of your site – maybe because it is a private company site or because you haven’t finished it yet, you’d change the second line to:

Disallow: /

So far, so good. Even a simple robots.txt file like the one above is better than nothing. But chances are there are areas of your site that you don’t want to be indexed. One of the most common areas to have robots banned is a private area on your site, maybe storing some common files that you need access to.

If this folder was called “private” then you’d add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Disallow: /private/

This would keep the search engine spiders out but would almost certainly act like a honeypot for hackers, so you’d need to take other precautions such as password protection to keep them out.

Assuming you’ve generated a sitemap for your site to help with indexing, you can also use robots.txt to tell the search engines where to find that file. Which is why the robots.txt file for this site includes the line:

Sitemap: https://seomax.co.uk/sitemap.xml.gz

Assuming you have a robots.txt file or decide to create one, it’s worth checking that it’s performing how you expect it. The instructions in the file are taken quite literally by the various search engine spiders, so it’s well worth checking that your robots.txt is telling them the right things. I use this free robots.txt checker to ensure that any of these files I create are working as expected.

Optimising Your Web Site – What You Need To Know

Putting your website on the internet is only the first part of the equation for attracting visitors to your site – optimising your web site is the next step.

There are millions upon millions of other web pages on the web and you need to do everything you can to make sure that your site is found when a potential customer searches for you.

Optimising your web site…

This needs to be done on a page-by-page basis. Each page on your site will have a slightly different focus and the optimisation process is designed to help the search engines to know the topic of each page.

Optimisation falls into two main sections: “on page” and “off page”. You’re in control of the “on page” aspect – it’s your site and you can amend pages whenever you want. We’ll deal with “on page” here.

Title Tag

This is the part of your page that shows up when your page appears in the Google search results. In the case of this page, it’s “Optimising Your Web Site – What You Need To Know”.

You should think of your title tag as being the headline that invites internet surfers to click and find out more. You need to include your main keyword phrase for the page in the title. Because of the way the search engine algorithms work, keywords nearer the start of the title are considered more important than words towards the end of the title. Which means that you should try to put your important keywords closer to the start of the title. However, since the title is designed to get people to click on it, don’t do this at the expense of readability.

The other thing to remember about titles is that search engines will only display the first 65 characters of the title (they may go over this by one or two characters, but don’t rely on this). If the title is longer, you’ll see an elypsis at the end, indicating that the complete title is longer:

 

For this particular page, the title was a lot longer at 104 characters.

What this means is that if you use long titles, you need to make sure they will make sense when they are displayed in the search results.

Meta description tag

It used to be that the description tag was always used by the search engines as the text below the title in the search results. Nowadays, this is happening less and less: Google and the other search engines are often using extracts from your page depending on what was searched for.

That said, there are occasions where your meta description tag is used, so it is worth putting in a precis of your page content. Make it snappy and reasonably concise – a good rule of thumb is no more than 160 characters, including spaces.

Heading tags

These are the titles that your site visitors see when they reach your page. Your website design software will help you put them into your pages.

Heading tags come in six different sizes.

H1 is the biggest and should only be used once on any given page, much the same way as a newspaper only has one headline for a story.

H2 is the next biggest and is used for important sub headings.

H3 through to H6 are used for other, less important, headings.

Google will pay attention to your heading tags to help determine what your page is about. And, of course, your site visitors will see the heading tags and use them to guide themselves through your pages.

Image names

Depending on your market, images may or may not be important for attracting visitors to your website.

Search engines find it harder to analyse pictures and other images so the name an image is given helps them with this task. Naming an image picture1.jpg is a lot less helpful to a search engine than calling the image title-tags.png (as the image above is called).

Don’t stress too much over image names. Just keep in mind that a meaningful name will help the search engines to make sense of your pictures and will also help you with finding them.

Other page content

This is the main text on your website pages. Write naturally but do your best to weave in your keyword phrase as you write. Be sensible – don’t use it too much but don’t skip your keyword phrase altogether!

If your page reads OK to you then it’s probably OK for the search engines as well. If you’re not sure, ask a friend to read it as well.

Click here for help with optimising your web site.

Why Use A Search Engine Optimisation Service?

Google and the other search engines list the results they give you in an order of likely importance that’s decided by their ever-changing, complex computer programs so it pays to keep on top of this by using a search engine optimisation service.

These programs are usually referred to as search algorithms – the word algorithm is just mathematical shorthand for going through a sequence of events until a result is found.

search engine optimisation serviceIn the case of Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines, these algorithms happen at lightening pace. Google tells you how long it took their program to get the results you see – times of a quarter of a second are typical, even when there are millions of potential results to sift through.

The aim of search engine optimisation is to give your site a fighting chance of appearing near the top of the results. And using a search engine optimisation service means you can concentrate on actually running your business, rather than turning yourself into a full-time nerd.

Like anything, the more you do something, the better you get at it. We’ve been optimising websites since 1995, which is before Google was even born. In that time, we’ve witnessed lots and lots of changes in the search engines. Which means we’ve found out what works and what are merely fads, designed to trick the search engines for a short period of time until their algorithm gets changed to weed out these spammy results.

This knowledge means that we only offer completely legitimate methods of improving your search engine rankings in our search engine optimisation packages.

You could spend years mastering optimising your web site for the search engines. And then hours and hours every month keeping on top of all the subtle – and not so subtle – changes. Or you could employ an expert like us.

You do this in other areas of your business. Chances are that you don’t run your own phone company, print your own headed notepaper, make your own pens and envelopes, etc. It stands to reason that the same goes for getting your site closer to the top of the search results.

The other thing to remember about optimising your website for the likes of Google is that results don’t happen overnight. They used to – maybe ten years or so ago – but the massive volume of pages that are indexed nowadays means that “instant” is impossible for the average website. Sure, a major news event will get a page to the top of the search results in seconds or minutes. But that page will drop out again just as fast when the news is over. It’s the way of the world.

It’s a bit like the race between the tortoise and the hare. The news event is the hare: it gets to the top of the search engine results fast but doesn’t stay there. Search engine optimisation is like the tortoise: it takes longer to get to the first page of Google but, once it’s there, it’s fairly easy to keep it there.

Just how easy depends on the industry you’re in. A chemist wanting to sell a blue pill online will have more of a struggle to reach the top of the results than, say, someone renting out a conference room or someone else selling custom made furniture.

Which means your budget should be set bearing in mind how competitive your industry is. If you’re unsure, just contact us and we’ll help.

The best time to start optimising your website is as soon as you can. Expect results to start showing through in a few months unless you’re in a highly competitive industry.

Take a look at our search engine optimisation service packages here.